Defining, Deifying Reagan in History

In his jacket and baseball cap, Ronald Reagan ambles along the beach near the Santa Monica pier mostly unnoticed, looking like just another duffer out for a Sunday afternoon stroll.

With his memory vanquished by Alzheimer’s, he is a man in his fading years, if not moments, unaware of the wave of nostalgia for his leadership and the ideological battles raging over the meaning of his life and eight-year presidency.

Americans like to sanctify their presidents--perhaps to atone for the virulent debate that went on when they were in power--and after a decade, there is a move to afix the memory of Ronald Reagan onto a variety of pedestals.

In February, on Reagan’s 87th birthday, Washington’s National Airport became Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. In May, a new gargantuan federal building in Washington officially takes the name of the president who had such amused disdain for bloated government.

In late February, 26 state legislators in Arizona had a 15-minute screaming match over whether to rename the politically incorrect Squaw Peak Highway, which runs through Phoenix, after the politically controversial Reagan. (The effort failed.)

An aggressive campaign by one of his conservative acolytes seeks to rename at least one highway, byway, building or boat after him in every state and, if all goes well, across Eastern Europe. There is even discussion about carving his likeness into Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

“Usually nostalgia comes after a generation,” says Edmund Morris, whose authorized biography of Reagan will be published this fall. But in the case of Reagan, who left office in January 1989, “Nostalgia . . . seems to have kicked in very soon.”

Indeed, with the passing of time (particularly these scandalous times in the Clinton White House), and with the proximate possibility of Reagan’s passing, America has been reestablishing its psychic bond with the 40th president, creating powerful needs to mythologize the man with the smile, the wave, the pompadour.

But the mythic needs of Republicans and conservatives are very different from those of historians, Democrats, Clintonites. And even from the public, which has its own stake in remembering Reagan fondly.

Even an anti-Reaganite like former New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo can get misty-eyed about Reagan’s “endless geniality”--even while giving him “non-passing grades for his performance as president, things he believed in and did to the country.”

A loyalist like former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan says his magic was not just that “he spoke with charm but that he led with courage,” projecting optimism and strength as he stood against communism and for dominance of the marketplace.

Ultimately, Morris says, Reagan is being remembered now by liberals and conservatives alike for sticking to strong principles, right or wrong.

“The two presidents that succeeded Reagan abandoned their principles whenever the wind and current changed,” he says. “I see Reagan as a sort of battleship forging ahead no matter what the weather.”

Reveries about Reagan or any former president grow out of the public’s need for heroes who are the bearers of America’s best virtues and values, says historian Robert Dallek, who taught for 30 years at UCLA and is now at Boston University.

“So when we pass through an episode like we’re going through now, with Bill Clinton and accusations of lying, perjury, sexual misconduct and obfuscation, there’s a natural inclination to look back to past presidents and exaggerate their virtues,” Dallek says. “You can only have heroes if you also have people with shortcomings.”

There is particular nostalgia for Reagan because he was credited with restoring a measure of confidence to the presidency following Jimmy Carter’s period of “malaise,” Dallek says.

Finally, he says, “Reagan’s illness adds to our current nostalgia. To capture the public’s historic imagination, it helps to be out of sight.”

Warring Republicans Can Agree on Reagan

Amid the struggle over Reagan’s legacy, the most passionate nostalgia for his leadership is rooted in the fratricide of today’s Republican Party.

Republicans can’t help but long for their 1980s glory days, when their Moses led them to a promised land, unifying fiscal and social conservatives, and election landslides.

William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, also credits a “Reaganite agenda” for the GOP’s 1994 takeover of Congress. In an article last fall, Kristol complained that the party has “re-splintered into its pre-Reagan component parts.”

Many Republicans suspect the yearning for Reagan might wane if a worthy successor came along, someone who could rally the conservative agenda the way John F. Kennedy picked up the liberal mantle 15 years after Franklin D. Roosevelt left off.

“Reagan was able to speak for all of us because he was clear on our objectives, clear on our beliefs and clear on our policies and values,” says Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.), a current House leader and Reagan loyalist who in 1971 named her second son after the then-California governor. “We don’t have that at all in the party now.”

At the end of his new Reagan biography, conservative scholar Dinesh D’Souza cautions against moving forward by looking backward for “another Ronald Reagan.”

Still, the dream of a true heir persists.

At the recent dedication of the George Bush presidential library in Texas, friends of the Bush family said that Texas governor and Bush son George W. Bush, a likely contender for the White House in 2000, is more like Reagan than he is like his own father.

Admirer Seeks Global Honoring

Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, has undertaken the quest of celebrating Reagan by monumentalizing him across America and in the former Soviet bloc.

It is Norquist’s Reagan Legacy Project that is behind the Squaw Peak Highway and Washington airport renaming efforts as well as dozens of others--a highway in Simi Valley, a bridge in Illinois, boulevards in New York City and Little Havana, Miami.

“My goal is to get as much named after Reagan as is named after Kennedy,” Norquist says, citing 600 JFK memorials.

But the showdown over the airport renaming is a reminder that history belongs to those who claim it. Recalling his first flight into Washington after the name change, Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), who sponsored the legislation, said he “teared up when I heard the pilot announce, ‘We are now landing in Ronald Reagan airport.’ Now generations will remember him.”

Yet air traffic controllers, who lobbied hard against the change, can barely choke out the name, recalling that it was Reagan who fired 11,000 of their colleagues during a 1981 strike. When some Democrats begged President Clinton to veto the bill, however, the administration sent out the message, “We’re signing it, forget it--go away,” says a senior White House official.

For White House officials who believe that Republicans are generating Reagan nostalgia to use as a foil against Clinton’s vulnerabilities, the airport battle raised delicate issues.

The White House was in the “tricky position of trying to embrace Reagan’s legacy of destroying communism and setting the stage for an undivided, democratic Europe, while subtly criticizing Reaganomics so as not to deify the guy,” says the aide.

A compelling two-part PBS documentary about Reagan’s presidency--which recently drew 15 million viewers, more than double its normal audience--reminded this aide, now in the vise of the Monica S. Lewinsky fracas, that every recent administration has dealt with scandal. Reagan’s second term, for example, was swamped by claims that he traded arms for hostages in Iran.

However, Clinton’s high approval ratings, despite allegations of sexual misconduct and perjury, baffle many Reagan fans, who judge his moral authority in the role of commander-in-chief superior to Bill Clinton’s. Morris underscores a difference.

“Remember when Clinton was asked what kind of underwear he uses, and he said boxer shorts?” Morris says. “With Ronald Reagan, not only would he have been completely bewildered by the question, but it would not have been asked of him because he had a self-protective dignity which everyone sensed.”

Walking up on the end of a millennium, conservatives are making a case for Reagan as one of the great men of the 20th century, a sort of bookend to FDR.

“We are thinking, ‘Who were the big guys?’ ” Noonan says. “Roosevelt and Reagan were both powerful correctives. They both rose pointing out derelictions of government and society; they both helped save Europe; they both . . . took measures that turned around the American economy, and they were both as human beings riveting personalities.”

The comparison rings false to Cuomo, who delivered a memorable speech attacking Reagan at the 1984 Democratic convention.

“Reagan made the denial of compassion acceptable and did it in such a wonderfully svelte way,” Cuomo says. “Reagan gave the middle class a reason not to care about the poor because they would waste it anyway. . . . Welfare was a rip-off. . . . Reagan convinced Americans--and they wanted to be convinced.

“Stand Reagan next to FDR, who brought us through a world war and Great Depression?” Cuomo asks rhetorically. “No way.”

Public, Historians Differ on Legacy

While the majority of Americans consistently rate Reagan a good to great president, many historians aren’t quite ready to assess his legacy. All of Reagan’s papers haven’t been released; his clearest legacy, negotiating the last phases of the Cold War, is not fully understood; other accomplishments remain unproven.

Historian Michael Beschloss says Reagan’s ranking depends on the answer to a key question: Was winning the Cold War worth the massive budget deficits created by the arms buildups?

“Now that is an example of something we need more time to evaluate,” Beschloss insists.

Still, some historians aren’t shy about their opinions.

In 1996, 32 historians (including Cuomo) polled by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. for the New York Times Magazine ranked Reagan 25th among American presidents. Last year, he came in 26th in another rating by 719 historians and political scientists in America and Europe.

Disgusted by the liberal bias of the Schlesinger crowd, a group of conservatives roused its own partisan group, including William F. Buckley and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Not surprisingly, it ranked Reagan among the greats.

“Reagan belongs on Mt. Rushmore,” Buckley told Policy Review, which published the ranking. “And he’ll be there after the carpers die off.”

But Beschloss is reluctant to compare presidents from different periods. “How do you compare Lewis and Clark to the Internet and rank them numerically?”

A Happy Departure From White House

The one person who should have the most to say about this legacy is the man who owns it.

But even if he could speak about the past, Reagan probably wouldn’t care a whit about the hagiographers, historians or others struggling to define a man who was evanescent even when he was in the spotlight.

No other president left the White House as happily as Reagan did, reports Morris. Few were as disengaged over their record.

Other than seeing to the completion of his presidential library in Simi Valley, Reagan was not terribly interested in self-aggrandizement. In the PBS series, family and friends testified to his breathless lack of introspection and his breathtaking quality as a remote yet charming man.

“I never came across anyone with less ego and more id,” says Morris. “He had this huge sense of personal mission but at the same time absolutely no vanity. . . . Reagan did not much care about his place in history.”

A sign on his desk spoke to what Reagan did value. “There is no limit to what you can achieve if you don’t mind not taking credit.”

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.